Sparkstalking
by antepathy
Summary: IDW MTMTE:  The Sparkeater hunts his prey. Violence, gore, character death, present tense. Dear self stop writing fics for which FFN has no tags.


R  
>IDW, MTMTE<br>Sparkeater, ref to Shock  
>graphic violence, ref canon character death.<br>Headcanon spew about Sparkeaters for **tf_speedwriting** prompt 'stalking'

My attempt to go really 'alien' with sparkeaters, I guess. The present tense is deliberate.

Hunger. Its name is Hunger. At least for now. Sometimes its name is something else: Lack, or Satiation or Darkness or Anger or Fear. It is Hunger now, Hunger and Freedom, the corridors stretching before it like arteries of possibility before its nonsight.

It turns its head, ultrasonic fins sending out echolocation pings, painting the hallways before it in almost excruciating detail that blurs and mixes if it tries to focus. It doesn't try.

So long. So long it has been held, kept in the lumpy cube, with the rancid, reeking corpses of turbofoxes. So long it has been named Want and Darkness.

Now it is Movement and Hunger.

It remembers time only dimly, as is right for a creature born on the marches of the Benzuli Expanse. It is a thing of the margins, neither life nor death. It remembers other names it has had, other alternations: hunger and satiation alternating, as another mech, one with light-filtering optics, might measure his life in day and night.

It does not. It does not measure its past, in dark or light, its world a shroud of darkness, an endless slipping of the Now into the chaos of the Past. Often, it can't remember its names; often, it doesn't even try. The present is enough, with space and sound, hunger and hollowness.

Of the future, it has no thought; the future for it now is merely Hunger seeking Satiation, the way a lover pursues its beloved, chasing a new name.

It stalks down the corridor, every detail a colorless hum of place. Its own body is a cluster of sound, limbs like sonic lines of possibility, propelling it down the corridor. Actual sound blurs the edges of the clean lines, contours fuzzing with overlapping sinewaves.

The sparks in its chamber stir, tingling and querulous. Its grapple-limbs skitter over the walls, screeling along the metal plating, touching where its echolocation is not enough: floor, wall, ceiling, seam.

It lacks audio-receptors in the audible sound range: there is nothing to hear in the Dead Universe, where even sound is annihilated. Its echolocation works perfectly there; here it is an imperfection, an approximation, that creates the world anew with every pingshimmer of ultrasonic waves from its emitters. Sound is a bubble of input, boiling location.

Hunger stalks the corridor, limbs flexing and stretching, newly discovering movement and range. Every moment was new to it, every experience a sharp-blade novelty. It recognizes little, but seeks, knowing with a trust deeper-rooted than its memory that it will recognize what it wants.

It will know. It has faith.

It glides on a wave of sound, as if drawn by a thread of possibility, chittering with eagerness: Hunger becomes Hunting.

And there: a bright glow, blue-white and shimmering in its sonic sight, a dense, intricate knot of energy and sound, the high resonance of atoms singing a wild chorus of Life.

Hunting swashes back into the sonic wall, flaring its armor's sonar receptors to catch the singing siren call of a spark, evolved, advanced, bright and polyphonic enough to blast the flat monotone of turbofox from its limited memory cache. Hunting has discovered Prey. It cares no more for Prey's name than it does its own. Names are things to be discarded, scraped husks of life sucked dry, like the rusted, brittle frames of turbofoxes. Even less, for a turbofox had some tang-flat spark of energy to it. Names had none, blats of gross sound, waves obese and thick, the opposite of sparks-high and refined, intoxicating knots of endless complexity it would take decacycles to unravel.

A crackle—six crackles—captured life turns electric, stripped of memory and identity and turned into pure Force, as Hunting shoots its grappling cables forward, mouth opening in a soundless, sucking hiss.

A wall of sound , the prey screaming, jaw stretching around some horror as Hunting struck, grapples shocking into the living frame. And it lunges, slavering and eager, taking this new life that writhes and thrashes beneath it, becoming Feeding.


End file.
